Using Pelican Themes on Windows

Using Pelican Themes on Windows

As I’m figuring out the Pelican blogging platform one of the first things I wanted to do was learn how to change the theme. The easiest way to accomplish this is to leverage the git system on the Windows workstation and then make Pelican aware that they exist.

To copy the existing themes from the central GitHub repository you would first open a command line on the Windows workstation and navigate to the main Pelican working directory. In my case that is ‘C:\project_stuff\pelican’ and run the following Git command.

git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes.git

That will create a new folder in your working Pelican structure called ‘pelican-themes’. As the command indicates the existing themes in the GitHub repository are then cloned to this new directory.

c:-|-project_stuff\pelican|-cache|-content|-output|-pelican-themes

Next, you edit the pelicanconf.py file in the Pelican working directory and add the following entry… 'THEME = pelican-themes/bootlex' and save the file. Here I changed the theme to ‘bootlex’. As of today the following site pelican-themes-gallery.place.org had a visual rendering of most of the themes.

Finally, running the ‘pelican content' command will recompile the site using the new theme.